ADAM YOUNG W/ CURT THOMPSON
I will be attending one of these seminars the first weekend of each month for eight hours each session. There were SEVEN sessions, and I plan to to break them each down more for myself than for anyone else!
Trauma changes the brain. And Adam wants us to have compassion in regards to why we do what we do. Just like falling down the stairs hurts your knee, trauma hurts your brain. And this session will teach us why our brain responds like it does.
Kindness to yourself will take you farther than you can imagine! So don't get overwhelmed if this all feels too much. I always struggled with what it meant to be kind to myself. What does that mean? It means that we have compassion on ourselves for hard all of this is for us.
Remember: we don't know very much about the brain. We understand about the brain, what dentists understood about dentistry in the 1800's.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN INFORMATION COMES INTO OUR BRAIN:
Information from the outside world, arrives through the sense organs. When a difficult situation occurs, you are seeing a person's facial expressions and hearing what their voice sounds like. The THALAMUS takes information and passes it on in TWO separate directions:
- AMYGDALA PATH: This information travels here from the thalamus in 1/12 of a second!!
- HIPPOCAMPUS & PREFRONTAL CORTEX: The information arrives at the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in 1/2 a second.
You may think that one-twelfth vs. one-half isn't a very big deal. But that means it moves through the amygdala (I call that "Boss Amy") 4x as fast!! It's like traveling through town through rush hour vs. trying to do it at midnight.
What this means is: by the time information has reached your prefrontal cortex and you have the ability to make a choice and consciously reflect on what you are experiencing, Bossy Amy has already evaluated what is happening to you and decided how you should react.
You react to an experience before you think about it!
This is why, if you see a black wire on the floor and KNOW it is electrical tape, Bossy Amy may have already reacted and you felt scared before you could even TELL YOURSELF it was black electrical tape (and not a snake!) "Hey, Amy, snakes aren't usually found in a building. This is probably not a snake!" The Hippo calms Amy by providing context.
Hippo damps the fear response of Bossy Amy.
So in actually:
You react before you've had time to think about it.
Your Amygdalia bases its evaluations on ONE criteria: SURVIVAL. It generalizes threats. The Hippo provides context. Bossy Amy's job is to evaluate what is presently happening to us and assure we stay alive. It remembers all your bad experiences. It is a part of the social brain.
Bossy Amy is super important. She keeps us alive. If we see a bear in the woods, we don't want to take time to think about what to do. We want our body to respond immediately and instinctively.
However, in order for Amy to work super fast, she has to make very quick generalizations. When the visual information about the curvy black electrical cord arrives at the hippocampus, the hippocampus does it's job. It's job is to provide you with with additional context, which dampens the fear response of the AMYgdalia.
While AMY is screaming, "SNAKE!!!!", your HIPPOcampus is slowly getting the information and will provide additional information to help you calm down. But Amy may very well have already started the process of a panic attack.
But what if your Hippocampus is damaged?
Trauma damages the hippocampus!
This is where the biggest issue occurs. Physical abuse or sexual abuse or PTSD means that hippocampus can actually shrink (by as much as 12-20%!) So HIPPO (and the prefrontal cortex) steps in to try and calm Amy, but he finds he really isn't as able to do it as he used to because he isn't as strong as he used to be. But ...
The hippocampus can heal!
Here's the cool part! HIPPO is healable. But trauma affects the physical parts of your brain just like spraining your ankle affects your body. But in the meantime, Hippo and the prefrontal cortex struggle to down-regulate Amy. How does Amy learn how to down-regulate? Well, she has depended on her early caregivers to teach her how to regulate herself. And if Hippo is broken, he can't help us down-regulate. Bossy Amy takes over much more. And so, fear, anxiety, and panic seeps in.
Your brain doesn't have the same ability to calm down the reactivity of the Amgdalia. This stuff MATTERS. This isn't about a snake. But you interact with people everyday. And Amy will see danger in every single relationship with any other person. Whenever things get tense, or when things feel off between you and another person whom you care about, Amy's job is to tell you that you are in danger and you need to protect yourself.
There are nerual connections between Amy and Hippo. And the proper balance allows you to stay close to the other person and stay calm and engaged during difficult interactions.
The parent/child relationships set the stage for people to regulate their emotions.
The pre-frontal cortex is another portion of your brain that is connect to your precious Amy and therefore also has the ability to calm and soothe Amy. Affect regulation is monumentally important in having a good relationship with other human beings. Babies cannot soothe themselves. Baby Jane can't regulate her own Amgydalia. You do not have the necessary brain structures to regulate your body. You are extremely dependent on your primary caretaker/s to regulate your Amydalia and to soothe you when you are afraid.
If you had caregivers who were attuned to you and responsive to you, then you developed a secure attachment.
What secure attachment means neurobiologically, you developed descending fibers from your prefrontal cortex down to the amygdalia. If your caregivers were attuned to you, they made lots of neural connections. Deep connectivity. These descending fibers allow you to regulate your amydalia.
What the parent-child relationship does is set the stage for people to regulate their emotions.
Children have to learn how to regulate their own fear and anxiety. And this makes it easier to have relationships in life, particularly when they get stressful. The development of your prefrontal cortex was profoundly influenced by your early relationship with your primary caregiver/s. These relationships have a larger influence than later relationship. But the early experiences is vital.
This is why attachment matters so much. Secure attachment means thick connectivity.
"In trauma, the critical balance between the amgdalia and the prefrontal cortex breaks down, which makes it much harder to control emotions and impulses." Bessel van der Kolk
If this is you: HAVE COMPASSION ON YOURSELF! You don't have as robust an ability to contact Bossy Amy. It is harder for you to control your emotions and your impulses.
But remember ...
The brain can experience healing!
The reason we are learning about this is because we can get better! We can get whole, integrated, and see healing and improvement.
What the resurrection of Jesus in neurobiological terms is that your neurons can reconnect!
Integration! Connectivity! Shalom!
Shalom refers to WHOLENESS. You and others. You and God. You and You. You and the land and Earth.
Society's word: Integration is the Christian's word: Shalom.
An integrated brain means that your left hemisphere has thick neural connections with your right hemisphere. That means what Shalom means when we are talking about a brain. It also means that your cortical brain (top part) has thick neural connections with your subcortical (the part that is down and in) ... what is called your limbic system.
Connectedness is another way of saying healing.
Integration = healing/wholeness/Shalom
How does this happen? Through LOVE.
"The best way to experience healing from trauma is to go find a bunch of securely attached people and get into relationship with them."
There are four pillars of the therapy relationship (doesn't have to be a relationship with a trained therapist that has alphabet soup after their name.) But these enhance the integration of neural networks. Those four pillars are as follows:
1. The establishment of a safe and trusting relationship. SAFETY! Emotional safety is monumentally important for a brain to heal. The foundation of safety is attunement. Safety doesn't mean a listening ear or a nice listening friend. It is much more about attunement and kindness than it is about niceness. If you won't tell me the truth about how you experience me, then I can't fully trust you and feel safe.
2. Mild to moderate levels of stress. THE BRAIN NEEDS SOME LEVEL OF STRESS TO HEAL! When you share a painful story, and you have them, and an attuned listener listens, you will experience some sort of uncomfortable emotions. You will experience the stress of sorrow or anger or fear depending on what happened to you in the story. What helps neural network heal when you are feeling big feelings is containment. The listener's regulated nervous system, helps to regulate your nervous system interactively.
"During our first few years, we have repeated experiences of going from a
comfortable, regulated state to a state of dysregulation. We become
frightened, cold, wet, and hungry, and show our displeasure with facial
expressions, bodily postures, vocalization, and crying. In the presence
of good-enough parenting, our signals are attended to, the source of our
displeasure diagnosed, and we are helped back into a regulated state.
Across thousands of these temporal-emotional experiences, we go from
regulation to dysregulation to reregulation. These experiences shape
secure attachment ." -- Louis Cozolino
3. Activating both emotion and cognition. BOTH FEELING AND THINKING IS WELCOME IN THE RELATIONSHIP! This is how your right and left hemispheres get linked. Cognition (Thinking) is a left hemisphere and feeling your feels is right hemisphere function. Trauma leads to a fragmentation of left brain thinking from right brain feeling. This is why you may share a horrific story of abuse and have very few feelings while you are telling the story. That's because your brain is fragmented. There are not sufficient connections between your thoughts of that abuse and your feelings of that abuse. When you can put words to those feelings, the activation of your Amydalia decreases.
4. The co-construction of new personal narratives. YOUR STORY! STORY WORK! When a story-teller and a story-listener work together to achieve a more truthful telling of your story, that's when things really start to happen.
"Stories are powerful tools for high-level neural network integration (Rossi, 1993). The combination of a linear story line and visual imagery woven together with verbal and nonverbal expressions of emotion activates and utilizes dedicated circuitry of both left and right hemispheres, cortical and subcortical networks, the various regions of the frontal lobes, and the hippocampus and the amygdala. The cooperative and interactive activation involved in stories may be precisely what is required for sculpting and maintaining neural network integration." -- Louis Cozolino
When you tell stories, lots of regions in your brain get connected.When you tell stories, neural networking can begin! When you can feel a big thing and put words to it, the activation of Amy decreases!
Healing occurs when we tell our stories to each other!
* * * * *
Kurt stepped in to discuss some of what Adam shared during the above talk. Some things to think about:
We live in a culture that has trained us to think we an change our world through sheer force. So much of our life is beyond our pure ability. We behave non-consciously. We are trained to believe we can change the world based on how we think about things. Without recognizing that so much of our life is being formed by our non-conscious brain. Those areas can run the show. And we need to have compassion for that. Sometimes we can't rethink ourselves into good behavior immediately.
There have been something happening in our mind that cause us to behave in some non-conscious ways. How much more practice we have being afraid than we have being thoughtfully attuned.
When left to its own accord, the brain behaves like an adolescent's bedroom.When we have a pattern of responding to something a certain way, it can be very challenging to change those patterns. This notion that we have these thickened practice neural pathways whose job it is to protect us, and we are trying to push against the Earth.
We must take that pause serious enough. This may take time. We are having to enter back into places where trauma has happened and where my fear will be reignited, in the hopes that a different story will be the outcome. This requires patience! Courage!
We need to commit ourselves to securely attached relationships. The very thing that we most long for, is also our source of greatest terror. When it comes to the healing of trauma, we must first acknowledge that we are up against a lot!
Genesis 3: everything tilts. Genesis 3:15: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel."
TRAUMA DOESN'T GET THE LAST WORD!
